Monday, February 2, 2015

It’s halfway through the winter, a day
that’s celebrated in many different ways.
It’s Groundhog Day, Imbolc, and
my mother-in-law’s birthday. Back in the
day, when I was a witch in a coven, we celebrated it as Candlemas, and it was
the time that we initiated new members. All
these different celebrations are mixed in my memory, imparting a unique flavor to
this windy afternoon.

Mercury is retrograde, and that always
brings on feelings of nostalgia. We hear
echoes from the past. Old habits are
resurrected, old patterns of thought resurface.
I recently read a blog about “political correctness” making a comeback,
and it reminded me both of the radical movements of thirty years ago, and of
the backlash to that radicalism.

Mercury goes direct on February 11, but
it spends the rest of the month in what’s known as the shadow period. It moves slowly, reclaiming lost ground,
until it reaches the point where it went retrograde, on March 3. So February’s tone is generally thoughtful, a
time to remember and to process.

This Mercury retrograde gives us a
chance to really look at the words and phrases we use, to check out the
emotional charge that each one carries. We
are lucky to live at a historic moment in which communication is
burgeoning. In some ways, it’s an echo
of the period when the printing press was first developed, and when cities were
suddenly full of pamphlets and tracts.

Mercury is in the reasonable, logical
sign Aquarius all month, and this encourages dialogue, inquiry and education. People talk about unconscious bias, economic
principles, gender politics, the biosphere, and everything else. And then there’s Black History month, always
a great time to share lost stories, and to look at the sources of current
tensions in past events.

People weigh in on social issues, and
respond to others who see things differently.
We’re still sharing all the experiences curated by influential people – the movies, the TV, the political drama –
but now we’re also connecting around more spontaneous and ordinary experiences.

This can make people uncomfortable,
given that we have been trained to passivity for many years, as audiences and
consumers. How does it feel when a
fellow audience member stands up and starts singing an aria? Our first impulse is to hush them. After all, we’re not here for that. Or are we?
Maybe, as Jane Wagner said, the play is the soup, and the audience is
art.

As we turn our heads to see what’s
happening beside us, rather than staring ahead at the screen, we see so much
more. All the communication builds energy,
and turns into organizing. We see this
in the Black Lives Matter protests in New York City and around the nation. These protests interrupt the flow of ordinary
life, just as routine racism disrupts the lives of Black people. They get people involved, thinking about
issues that may have seemed distant in the past.

Mercury’s retrograde in Aquarius also
lends itself to fixing things, and we see this in the budget that President
Obama sent to Congress today, with its focus on shoring up the country’s
infrastructure. His budget also reverses
the sequester, recognizing that it was a lousy idea to begin with. This is how Mercury retrograde is supposed to
be used. It’s about repairing things
that are broken, and making changes to things that never worked well.

Underneath this month’s reasonable Mercury-in-Aquarius
veneer, though, there are some storms. Uranus
and Pluto are still at odds, moving towards their last exact square in
mid-March. So there’s tension building,
as different factions jockey more and more intensely for position.

There are strong fiery and watery
influences all through the month, and that puts the Aquarian sun and Mercury at
a distinct disadvantage. The watery
planets are all in Pisces, the most sensitive and intuitive of signs, and these
make for a more subjective and vulnerable approach. Among the Pisces figures are the martyr, the
saint, and the poet; these are people
who are generally not open to discussion.
And the sun itself leaves Aquarius and enters Pisces on February 18,
just after the new moon.

On February 19, the first day of the new
lunar cycle, there are five planets in Pisces, so emotion is at a high
pitch. It’s like the sound of the mermaids
singing. You may not understand what
they’re saying, but you know how they make you feel. And for the rest of the month, we’ll all be
going from feeling to feeling, while Mercury in Aquarius tries to explain us to
each other.

During the last part of February, the
urge to believe will be stronger than ever, and the connection with reality
could become a lot more tenuous. People
will reach for their religious and spiritual shelters, but for some people there’s
an ongoing need to defend these shelters against those who think or act differently.

This, coupled with the stressful power
issues associated with the Uranus/Pluto square, could mean violence. And there are the fiery influences – Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus and the south node all in fire signs. So passions could flare, and old anger could
be forged into new weapons, especially among people who believe strongly in the
hero myth.

And that means us here, in the US. Uranus and Pluto will form a T-square with
the sun in the US’s chart, so important questions about our national identity
will come up. It’s a turning point for
us. What do we believe in? Can we pursue a reasoned approach? What do we do about our most vulnerable
citizens – and can we even agree on who they are? Why are advocates for fetuses on one side,
and advocates for small children on the other side? And how do we really make change, as opposed
to putting new actors in the same old roles?

But yes, it is a time of change, irresistible
change. And along with the changes,
there will be a powerful flow of emotion.
The poets, saints and martyrs will all give their particular spin on it,
running across the pages of the history books yet to be written.